¡ Carnival !

In Spanish there is a word for my past weekend ferrar-to dance, to fiesta, to relax, meet new friends… it encompasses all. And that was this past weekend … (extended weekend). Friday (02/11)– Tuesday(02/15).

Carnival is similar to marti gras and ends the Tuesday before ash Wednesday (today)... Except all of Latin America takes it very seriously. Depending on where you go there are water fights, parades, and people with giant foam sprayers… anything goes…

So we decided to head to the coast in the province of Esmeraladas in the town of Tansupe (pretty much a giant beach town). We took a bus out of Quito Thursday night at 11:45pm and after a very uncomfortable, sweltering hot semi-sleep we were in Esmeraladas at 5:45am.

Most of days and nights were similar so to save you from repetitive details I will recap a normal day/night with the highlights and lowlights.
Day: We spent our days pretty much in el mar. The waves were huge and the water was incredibly warm! I personally did not sunbath much as my time in the water fried me… even with applying 50 SPF every couple of hours… One day we rented boogie boards ($1/hour) and some local kids took the time to teach us to ride the waves… I was pretty pathetic without their help but once they helped me it was a blast. We even got in some intense games of ultimate Frisbee in which I’m pretty sure no one had ever seen because some people just came and sat to watch our game (that our seeing a bunch American girls in swimsuits sprinting around, personally I think it was their interest in the sport). I was super excited to get a morning beach run in here as well, as in Quito I rarely get a safe opportunity to run.
We decided to get groceries for our group in order to save some money, so myself and two others took the only type of taxi in town (a motorcycle with a cart attached on
back) to the local grocery store and bought some essentials.

Beach highlights:
-They have all those sweet raft things…. We road the giant banana boat
-They had a giant stage thing one day and we did intense dancing aerobics
-Pina Caladas (With pretty much a fruit tree on top)
-fresh fruit cups
-agua de coco
-olas enorme

Night:
So after a delicious dinner, we all got ready and headed back to beach. The beach is filled with thatched roof open bars with giant wood dance floors. There are so many people covering the beach and crammed in every bar. The nights were filled with trying to learn to salsa dance and other dances. My favorite game to play was when we would tell people Kelly was married to a man in Quito with 3 kids, we got a few believers on this one, but a few saw through this. We met some new friends who lived in Quito and hopefully can continue salsa lessons with them here!
Highlight of the beach:
Swimming in the ocean at 3am (there is one more detail to this but this is a family blog  )

Lowlights:
Beach hamburgers smell amazing, yet, do not eat… clearly I did not eat one but about half the people that ate them ended up with severe food poisoning, puking the whole next day, two even went to the hospital. Also 4 girls in our group got robbed by a group of men with pipes and unfortunately lost their purses some with cameras.
Despite the few lowlights the trip was incredible, watching the sunset over the Pacific Ocean on a beach full of Ecuadorians is hard to put into words.
Luckily, we bought our bus ticket home for 10pm Monday night. It rained all Monday night and there mudslides all over the road we road home on. People who waited until Tuesday morning to leave took over 15 hours to get home, due to closed roads from the mudslides.

Fortunately, we made it to our bus a few minutes before it pulled out of the station... how we made it was was a gift from God...

so the only taxis were motor-taxis... and motor taxis can't go 20 min on the highway... somehow we manged to get the attention of truck driver and all 15 of us and ALL our luggage got in the back of the truck and booked it down the highway through the pleating rain... it was kind miraculous... and extremely fun!

The way home our bus got stopped twice by police: the first time they just asked for everyone’s idea (which almost none of us had, which lead to a small lecture from angry police) but it was fine. The second time everyone had to get off the bus to be searched… I’m still not completely sure why but I think they were searching for thieves.